Metal Angel

by Nancy Springer

  The show was reaching its height. Burning Earth had upped tempo and pulsed into “Before I Die,” with Volos soloing on guitar—on many frontmen the guitar was nothing more than a giant phallic prop, not even plugged into the speakers, but Volos could really play. The critics made much of that, comparing him to Jimi Hendrix. Hooray for the critics. Funny thing they had never noticed how their new darling could have played his guitar more effectively if he had slung it a few inches higher instead of right at his crotch. But he wore it where it looked best. On that one matter at least, he had taken Mercedes’s advice.

  Or maybe he would have worn it there anyway. Volos liked being a big dick.

  Bink and Red were singing backup vocals, and Red had come over to share a mike with Volos, heads close, lips nearly touching in a stance that reminded Mercedes of a homosexual kiss. He felt a sudden hot stab of jealousy. That rapt, lovemaking look on Volos’s fine-edged face—it should not be shared with so many people, only with him. Damn Volos, he always did that, he gave everything he had, threw it all away to the crowd. He courted the mike, that cock of God, with soft lips and fluttering eyelids. He offered to that hellbeast of arms and faces beyond the lights his heart on a platter, his music the colors of wine. And it made people wild. Soon his worshipers would want to eat him. Someday they would tear him apart and swallow the bits, brown bread of the devil’s communion.

  “Boss?” It was the lighting man.

  “White,” Mercedes directed. “Just for a moment, until we see what we have.”

  Volos sang on with wings the color of the sun.

  Jealousy left Mercedes and was replaced by something far colder. He smiled, his teeth hard behind tight lips. “Red,” he ordered.

  All right, he would share his lover. All right, he was the pimp and Volos the whore who would make him rich. All right, Volos could be the sun if he wanted, and Mercedes nothing more than a spot on its face. Mercedes could wait. He knew what always happened to superstars.

  Finale. From dry ice, smoke poured up, throwing everything into shadow. Gunshot sounds ricocheted from the synthesizer. The lights swung wildly, thrashing, flailing, red whips of a raging god. Amid it all, Volos buckled to his knees, guitar laid down like a defeated sword, head bowed, wings flowing down a king’s sunset cloak onto the stage.

  God, the bastard knew how to pose. Mercedes smiled again, watching the first of the girls up front struggle onto the stage and run sobbing toward him.

  It was only a matter of time.

  In the bowl of the amphitheater the fans stood on their seats, necks stretched and mouths agape, far too many baby birds in a nest far too large. From where he stood, just offstage, Texas could see only out-reached, imploring hands and heaving breasts. Lots of breast and cleavage. Looked to him like these girls hadn’t dressed at home.

  “Volos,” they cried out like wood thrushes. “Volos!” Their reedy voices grew stronger, were joined by the darker shouts of men. Cries became a chant.

  “Vo-LOS! Vo-LOS! Vo-LOS!”

  “I hope he doesn’t get ’em too psyched,” Texas muttered to himself. Mobs scared him. Instead of his customary western string tie he wore a clip-on so that he could not be strangled.

  “Vo-LOS! Vo-LOS! Vo-LOS!”

  Standing as he was in the wind of the speakers, Texas could see their invocation more than hear it. The panting chests. The half-lidded eyes, the mouths wide open as if bread of communion hung for the taking in the vibrating air. And the kid was not holding anything back as the show drew to a close, singing his heart out, dancing like fire, shining all over with sweat and glory. Between numbers he drenched his head with water, shaking it so that his dark hair flew and flung off droplets, sprinkling the front rows. Those who felt that baptism wept and screamed.

  Texas thought, I hope the kid knows what he’s getting into. At first the bared breasts had deceived him. He had assumed he was seeing one of humankind’s simpler, more manageable emotions: lust. But now he knew. This was dangerous. This was worship.

  Volos was right out at the front of the lowest part of the stage, touching people’s hands. He gave too much, he trusted too much. Texas hoped—

  It was too late for hoping. The last chords were rocketing with the fireworks, then falling, falling, Volos had gone down on his knees to the horned god of dark music, and dozens of people, young men and women, were up over the lip of the stage.

  Texas ran forward. But—wait, the kid seemed almost to be expecting them. And all they wanted was …

  Volos kneeled like a novice knight, his back straight, head lifted. Music hushed as the band stood watching, uncertain (like Texas) what they needed to do. The lights shone down morning calm and pure. And the people around Volos, some of them fat, some of them ugly as sin, they were all pilgrims to the holy land, worshipers laying their hands on a piece of the cross; they stood in near-silence and touched him as gently as shepherds greeting the baby Jesus. A hundred hands gentled him on his arms, his chest, his neck, his head. Lips, many lips, brushed his hair and face. Like a flower turning to the light Volos turned up his face and closed his eyes. Somebody kissed the lids.

  Feeling way out of place, a heathen among the holy, Texas pushed his way to the kid’s side—

  Volos screamed.

  In the same instant Texas saw: an anonymous hand coming away from the kid’s back, carrying a long, pale feather. Texas could not have felt worse if he had seen in the crowd a hand coming up pointing a gun.

  And before he could move another step, within an eyeblink it all turned ugly, it was all fighting, all hands that reached to grip and claw and tear. Volos was on his feet, with Texas pulling people off him and slinging them away, trying to position himself at Volos’s back, between the kid’s wings to defend them. Panicked, the kid didn’t help him any. But there were others getting into it, the band members, some roadies from backstage. By the time the uniformed security officers arrived, Texas and the irregulars almost had things under control.

  “Fuck it, Texas!” Volos screamed at him when they faced each other offstage. “You let them get behind me!”

  The kid was shaking, and his dun-colored skin had gone ashy gray. “Easy does it,” Texas told him, trying to calm him with a hand on one shoulder. Volos pulled away.

  “Why did you let them get onstage? Where were the guards?”

  There had been a few polite men in sport coats stationed along the edge of the stage during the performance. Like him, Texas guessed, they had been thrown by the peaceful way it had all started. Or maybe by the numbers of people involved. It looked like there should have been more in the way of security.

  He said, “I’m sorry, Volos. I screwed up.”

  “And you said you’d never hurt me.” Volos turned calm but terribly, fiercely bitter.

  “Hey, man, lighten up.” A soft voice—it was Red. “Texas didn’t maul you.”

  Staring narrow-eyed at Texas, Volos seemed not to hear. “Judas,” he accused. “I trusted you.”

  Red tried again to intervene. “You trusted the fans, was the problem.” Crowd noise battered them, loud, screaming, as physical in its presence as a demanding child, making him raise his voice. “Texas just followed your lead. We all did.”

  After his years as a cop, Texas knew all the things people said when they were in trouble, and he scorned most of them. He knew he should speak up for himself, but did not. Partly, he was quietly angry—the kid should know better than to call him names. And partly, it all felt hopeless. What could he say when Volos felt so betrayed?

  The new guy, Bink, the sourpuss bass guitarist, came up and said, “It’s all part of the job, for Chrissake. Can we get to the encore before they tear the place apart?”

  Texas swallowed hard and bent to smooth a jutting feather. Volos jerked the wing away. “Don’t touch them!”

  “May I fix them, Volos?” It was Angie. Without waiting for his permission she started, and Volos sighed, extended his wings and submitted to her care. Texas watched, feeling his anger dul
l into worry. There were only a few drops of blood, only a few broken pinions and a tattered covert or two, but every mark made Texas feel sick. If the kid got feverish and infected again, Texas would hold himself to blame.

  “All right.” In a few minutes Volos was stonily ready, though his wings had gone bruise-blue. “Encore.”

  It was “Slavehouse of Power,” and Volos led the band through it like a tornado leading a storm front. This time, when the audience rushed the stage, Texas and a dozen roadies-cum-bodyguards were ready for them and held them off.

  Afterward, after Volos had signed a few carefully controlled autographs at the stage door, after the kid had been hustled through a gantlet of reaching hands, once in the bus and on the way to the next venue, the next hotel, Texas let himself close his eyes a moment. There had been a busty young woman at the stage door who had pulled down the neck of her T-shirt and invited Volos to sign her breast. “Over my heart,” she had breathed at him. But even that had not made the kid smile. He was barely speaking to anyone, not speaking to Texas at all, and his wings had gone the color of glare ice on the road. For a moment Texas wished he was back in Persimmon, West Virginia.

  “He’s not being fair,” said Angie’s soft voice next to him. Because he liked her—heck, he more than liked her, even though he knew she was not for him—Texas smiled, but he did not open his eyes.

  “Yepper, he’s throwing a fit, all right,” he said. “But the hell of it is, I know how he feels. I hate it when people get together like a pack of wolves. Let them catch you off guard and they’ll crucify you.”

  chapter eleven

  The next morning Brett phoned Texas at the hotel, as shaken as he had ever heard her. She had just received a rock-through-the-window message: “Volos the unholy, Prepare to DIE.”

  Simpleminded—but Texas knew better than to take it lightly. Even with people too far away to touch his wings, something about Volos always seemed to stir up the best or worst in them. There had been unholy rockers from the start and always would be, but religious-minded people were frightened by Volos as never before, and anti-rock crusades were heating up all over the country, first on TV and then wherever preachers wanted a piece of the action.

  Striding in scuffed Laredos down the hallway to talk with the kid, Texas felt somber, because he knew a lot about fanatics in general and their virulent hatred. But he had not yet heard of the most virulent anti-rock movement in the country, a tent-revival phenomenon called the Central Pennsylvania League for Moral Purity, headed by a charismatic pastor with a personal agenda, a holy man who had tragically lost a daughter and two grandsons to the seductions of rock music.

  Texas knew nothing of the Reverend Daniel Ephraim Crawshaw.

  At Volos’s room, he knocked. Mercedes opened the door and smirked. Beyond him, Volos sat mostly naked on a rumpled bed. Wings, gray-blue. Eyes, Texas saw as he walked closer, the rainy dark color of river water.

  Texas waited until Mercedes (who possessed the perfect insincere manners and sardonic charm of a well-paid gigolo) left the room, then asked, “How are the wings?”

  “Shit on the wings.”

  Texas hunkered down to look up into his charge’s face. “I mean it, kid. I’m worried, I remember what happened before. How are they?”

  Volos said more quietly, “They’re tender, that is all. Sore. Like my head.”

  “Are they gonna be okay?”

  “I think so.”

  Texas said what he should have the night before. “Volos, I never meant for that to happen. Didn’t seem at first like anything was wrong. Looked to me like you wanted those people near you.”

  “I know. I did.”

  “Then why are you mad at me?”

  “I’m not anymore.” This, Texas knew, was as close to an apology as he was likely to get, and that was all right with him. Having to apologize just hurt a man’s pride and made him madder inside, which didn’t help anything in the long run. Better to just let things go by.

  He said quietly, “What is it, then?”

  “I’m angry at myself. What are you doing down there? Get up.”

  Texas sat next to him on the bed and offered, “Why not just be mad at the fans instead?”

  “I am the one who has screwed up, Texas. I have failed from the day I came here. I wanted—”

  “A person don’t always get what they want.”

  “Would you shut up and listen? I came here to be with people. Hang around with them, fix cars, play poker, tell jokes, drink beer with friends. Ride a roller coaster, throw a Frisbee, walk a dog, paint the porch, get caught in the rain with somebody, have a baby.”

  Texas smiled, and Volos knew at once what he was thinking.

  “Fucking right, I want to do that! You know I’ve never done it with a woman?”

  “You’re kidding.” Texas was genuinely surprised. “I thought you had all the bases covered.”

  “How could I? Mercy would not let me, even if it wasn’t that the wings get in the way. I’ve never even been on a real date. Or dancing. Or to lie on the beach.”

  “Some of that stuff you can do,” Texas said. He remembered reading how Elvis did things. You’re a rock star or a movie star, you want to go skating, you rent the whole rink. If Volos wanted a woman, Texas imagined he could rent one of those too. A high-class one, with the money he had.

  “It is not just to do things.” Volos struggled to explain. “It is—it is that I wanted to be a person, and be with people, but everything keeps me away from them. My wings. This rock star thing.”

  “You didn’t plan on being a rock star?”

  Volos sat silent.

  “You never imagined yourself this way?”

  Very softly the kid said, “Okay, so I did.”

  Texas found that he felt irritated, unable to offer any sympathy. He said, “My mama always told me, watch what you wish for, you may get it.”

  “Why, what were you wishing for? Your father?”

  “No. I was mostly wishing nosy people would let me alone. Another thing my mama told me—things generally get worse before they get better.”

  “What things?”

  “Rock star things.” Texas described the death threat, watching the kid as he spoke, and feeling his irritation giving way to something like fatherly pride. Volos might be a prick sometimes, but he was a ballsy prick. At first his face grew very still, but a moment later he straightened, a fighter taking a stance, meeting a challenge.

  Texas said, “Do you want to hire a different security man to deal with this? Somebody who really knows what he’s doing?”

  “Bullcrap, Texas. Nobody is going to watch my backside better than you do. The one who did not know what he was doing was me. I seem to want two things at once.”

  “Well, that’s human, kid.”

  “Is it? Thank you. Then it is stupid of me to sit here moping.”

  “That’s human too.”

  “Everything seems to be human. So what must I do?”

  Texas shrugged. “Make up your mind, I guess. Are you going to be Volos the Unholy Head Banger or not?”

  “I must choose.”

  “Yes.”

  He waited, watching the kid’s wings, seeing them flare from gray into bonfire-orange, Halloween hard and bright. Sunrise orange, or sunset? Difficult to tell.

  Volos stood up, facing himself in the big hotel mirror. Lifted his head to a cocky angle. Smiled, narrow-eyed. In one potent motion pulled the lamp out of the wall above the bed and hurled it, shattering the mirror, as if he did not like what he saw there.

  “Jesus!” Texas sat where he was, too startled to move, not so much by the act as by the vehemence with which it was performed. “What the hell are you doing?”

  “I am doing what rock stars do. And now I know why they do it.”

  “Can’t you think of something else rock stars do?”

  “Certainly.” Volos began taking apart a desk chair with his hands. “They fuck groupies.”

  “Besides tha
t.”

  Volos threw pieces of chair at what remained of his mirrored reflection and said, “They give goddamn interviews.”

  METAL MAG: Volos, do you intend your music as an affront to organized religion?

  VOLOS: No, but organized religion is an affront to me. I think it is jealous, like an old man with a young wife.

  MM: Jealous? Of what?

  VOLOS: Everyone knows what I mean, but no one will say it, that rock is its own religion. The preachers know, and are afraid.

  MM: Rock? A religion?

  VOLOS: Yes, very much so. We all know who are the high priests of rock and who are the rock gods. Look at the graffiti: “Elvis lives,” “Jim Morrison will come again.” These are our gods who will come back to save us. We all know the rock mythology. And we all know what are the icons of rock, what is the ancient symbol we worship.

  MM: Symbol?

  VOLOS: They used to set up lingams in India. Now they set them up in dressing rooms.

  MM: Um … so you really think of the rock music community as another religion in competition with …

  VOLOS: It is the most potent of all religions and it will swallow all the rest. And the earnest men in black suits know that. Someone has said “God is dead,” and it is true. Knowing it is true makes the earnest men quite desperate.

  MM: How will your rock religion swallow all the rest?

  VOLOS: It is already happening. In rock and roll the self is encompassing, we are all infinite. We are all made of fire and Stardust. We are in the universe and it is in us. Nothing transcends. Therefore there can be no God, God is dead, and we all dance for joy that we are alive. The old gods danced before sourmouth Yahweh was thought of, and new gods dance now that Yahweh is gone. We are all gods, and we dance.

  MM: But some gods, certain singers for instance, are more exalted than others?